The Shaping of the ‘I’ in Dante and Petrarch

Abstract

The positioning of the ‘I’ is the central literary preoccupation of both Dante and Petrarch. Their reconstruction in writing of experiences highlights the interplay between the narrator and the vicissitudes narrated. Dante and Petrarch become, at the same time, both writer and reader of their own books of memory. Dante writes of his journey to becoming a poet, how by reflection and self-reflection the narrated subject is led gradually to a new vocation and made substantial by the poetical evocation of this very road. By contrast, Petrarch opens up a new field of poetical reflexivity by shaping an ‘I’ which is plural, everchanging and in contradiction to itself, showing that the attempt to reconstruct the past in writing can only reveal the ambiguity of the self.